My proposed paper will intervene in feminist debates about how to approach and analyse sexual and wider gender-based violence in Iraq specifically and the Middle East more generally. Recognizing the significance of positionality, I argue against dichotomous positions and for the need to look at both macro structural configurations of power pertaining to imperialism, neo-liberalism and globalization on the one hand, and localised expressions of patriarchy, religious interpretations and practises and cultural norms on the other hand. Rather than contributing to the taboo and silencing of sexual and wider gender-based violence within domestic Iraqi politics on the one hand, and the sensationalising and essentialist culturalist discourses on the other, I will make the case that we need to find nuanced and truly intersectional ways to talk about it. Trying to avoid the straightjacket of location and positionality - however shifting that might be given people’s multiple roles, transnational involvements and contextual identities - calls for historicising to avoid essentialist notions of culture and identity. But it also requires attention to regional and local agencies, complicities, historically specific patriarchal articulations and practises, and, crucially, I would argue, a critical engagement with militarised and other newly emerging masculinities. In the Iraqi context today, this concretely translates into a recognition that US and UK actions and policies linked to the invasion and occupation have contributed to the deterioration of women’s rights and the increase in gender-based and sexual violence, while simultaneously paying attention to and recognizing that local manifestations of militarised and neo-liberal patriarchal gender norms and relations are also rooted in regional, (trans)national and local power dynamics and struggles as well as historically specific contestations over resources, cultures and identities. Crucially, gender-based and sexual violence did not simply emerge post-2003 but have a history linked to the Ba‘th regime, which came into power in 1968 and lasted until 2003, and even further back the formation of Iraq as a nation state. We also have to look carefully at the specific political and economic dynamics linked to the Kurdish Regional Government, particularly post -1991. My contribution is based on over 10 years of engaging in empirical qualitative research on gender-based violence in Iraq and tis diasporas.

The use and abuse of rights-based-approaches to furthering gender justice has been the subject of debate and contestation in feminist scholarship. Across postcolonial studies, development studies, gender studies, critics have debated the positive and negative manifestations of the politics of rights. One of the important critiques of universalist rights discourses has been put forward by anti-imperialists, who have exposed the imperialist agendas behind certain rights discourses: a good example being Laura Bush’s plea on behalf of the rights of Afghani women which justified the US invasion of Afghanistan. While acknowledging the pertinence of the above critiques of rights discourses, my paper will problematize the anti-imperialist dismissal of rights discourses, as well as rights advocates, as either arms of western imperialism, or at best, as well-intentioned but uncritical implementers of a neo-liberal world order. I argue that anti-imperialist critics have disregarded the insights gained from Edward Said’s important article about “Traveling Theory,” and have been inattentive to the meanings and consequences of their critiques in different contexts and against very different power relations. I pose the question: what are the implications of the feminist / anti-imperialist critique when it travels and is used as a framework to interpret different realities on the ground. I will engage with this question by focusing on the anti-sexual harassment campaigns that evolved in Egypt in the aftermath of the 25th of January revolutionary wave in 2011.

Scholarship exposing the bias, ethno-centrism and reductionism in the portrayal of women in the Middle East in Western scholarship has been highly illuminating in exposing the hidden and invisible power dynamics and challenging western hegemony on constructions of women’s agency, rights and gendered relations. However, counter-critiques challenging Western narratives while useful for the Western contexts for which they were intended, may inadvertently contribute to the emergence of counter-reified identities about gender and gendered activism in the Middle East. When these interpretive frameworks are appropriated for understanding struggles around gender equality in contexts such as Egypt, instead of challenging reified identities, they run the risk of producing new ones when for example there is a conflation of Arab with Muslim, the authentic with the religious and the elite with the Western. This paper explores these discursive practices emanating from such scholarship through three case studies. The first is the manner in which the narrative conflating Arab with Muslim women tends to ignore the religious plural nature of many societies in the Middle East, including that of Egypt. As a consequence Coptic women are omitted from many of these narratives about the women in the Middle East. Second in a bid to challenge negative representations of religion in Western scholarship in the Middle East, such narrative have sometimes accentuated a pre-existing power dynamics in Egypt that delegitimize mobilization around gender equality that is not framed in religious terms and a tendency to shun them as foreign. Finally, some scholarship has pitted religious-inspired forms of activism against a feminist movement represented as exclusively elite and western, thereby contributing to generalisations about a highly heterogeneous set of actors. The paper then interrogates potential ways for continuing to challenge Western ontological hegemony about women in the Middle East while avoiding the counter-hegemonic reified identity constructs that serve to omit, homogenize and sometimes vilify local actors, and thereby undermine their gender justice struggles